How AI chimeras, absurd nursery rhymes, and Gen Z humour has birthed a chaotic new online aesthetic
Even in a world overrun by online content, the viral surge of so-called Italian “brainrot” (2024 word of the year in the Oxford English Dictionary) is something different, something remarkable. Look it up and find yourself transported in a universe of the uncanny. Stay too long and find yourself in a queasy state of disconnection from the real world – or going further and further down the rabbit hole.
Italian brainrot is a prolific online meme genre born of AI hallucinations, ridiculous rhymes, and digital derangement that refuses to make sense. And that’s exactly why it resonates, Diego De Angelis suggests, in an article for the Italian online publication L’Indiscreto. De Angelis’s essay on the phenomenon dives into this surreal internet subculture through characters such as Bombardiro Crocodilo and Trippi Troppi: grotesque figures often generated via AI, paired with pounding music and Dadaist verse. The result is “a bombastic mythology” that has infected social media timelines around the world despite (or maybe sometimes even because of) its lack of narrative coherence or semantic logic.
Originally emerging on TikTok, Italian brainrot memes are recognisably chaotic, low-resolution, and “cooked” (over-processed in a way that mimics digital decay). Their creators often combine mismatched AI-generated animal parts with nursery rhyme cadences in mutated Italian language that feel both childlike and threatening.
For instance, a character such as Bombombini Gusini, the half goose-half plane sibling of Bombardiro, appears in a bizarre verse about a Georgian man with two watermelons under his arms. And yet, this world has rules. “Each character has a page on brainrot.fandom.com,” De Angelis notes, “complete with a bio, historical events, and theme songs.” It’s a full-fledged, community-built pantheon of digitally mutated creatures.
Why has it taken off? First, the aesthetic is aligned with how some in Gen Z and Gen Alpha already engage with the world: through platforms like Minecraft and Skibidi Toilet, which normalise surrealism, fragmented storytelling, and a kind of cheerful nihilism. Second, even non-Italian speakers are obsessed – indeed the memes first became famous in the US, Latin America and Germany – proof that “meaningless” content can still carry emotional or aesthetic weight. As De Angelis puts it, “the nonsense, the soundplay, the lack of logic… they mesmerise.” Brainrot is not about understanding; it’s about vibe.
De Angelis also sketches out a philosophical throughline in his article. Some creators have drawn parallels to early 20th-century Italian Futurism, particularly Filippo Tommaso Marinetti’s Futurist poem Zang Tumb Tumb, a typographical barrage meant to mimic the sound and chaos of battle. One observers cites the concept of hyper-reality made famous by the French philosopher Jean Baudrillard, a point beyond which reality and representation, the real and the simulated, become confused.
In this meme-scape, the grotesque is beautiful, randomness is structure, and logic is beside the point. As Aiden Walker writes in his Substack How To Do Things With Memes, brainrot’s real power may be in parodying “Western rationality itself”: its tier lists, scientific classifications, and semantic hierarchies. Trippi Troppi and Camelo Frigo don’t exist outside the grid; they build their own.
Ultimately, De Angelis argues that Italian brainrot offers “not just degeneration, but experimentation”, a form of digital surrealism for a generation fluent in nonsense. Whether it fades or evolves, it has already reshaped the memescape.
Original article (“L’estetica memetica del brainrot italiano”) by Diego De Angelis first published in Italian on 22 April 2025.
It’s available here.
L’Indiscreto is an Italian online magazine dedicated to critical thought, cultural experimentation, and speculative nonfiction. It publishes essays, reviews, and commentaries that blur the lines between philosophy, literature, and digital culture.
